28 replies to this topic

[Xandralkus]

Shevchen, on 28 December 2012 - 01:43 PM, said:

A total equalization of all weapons will kill all the strategic and intelligent tactical gameplay.

If by 'tactical gameplay' you mean the ability of coordinated groups to find mathematically superior methods of applying firepower in unstoppable ways, then yes. It will kill that aspect of gameplay. That form of gameplay should never have existed in the first place. By making everything equally viable, we destroy the ability for anyone, or any team, to become overpowered. Additionally, it creates the capability for any single player, with any randomly selected weapons used to tonnage, to be equally as powerful as anyone else on the battlefield.

The only people that mathematically perfect gameplay balance hurts are the ones that try to gain an unfair advantage through metagame analysis of game mechanics. Remember that all of these weapons apply damage differently, and that no weapon would ever exist as a hard counter to another. By so closely matching their effectiveness to one another, we forever remove the capability for a group of players to exploit other players with an overpowered configuration. Even if one exists at all, it will only be a few fractions of a percentage point more effective, and there are thousands, even millions of permutations and power interactions possible. The reward for metagaming goes to near-zero, and the effort required for metagaming goes to near-infinite. In order to beat other players, you have to play the exact same game, and do it better. THAT is fundamentally good game design.

Additionally, thank you for pointing out the mathematical error in the Large Pulse Laser. Those numbers were previously calculated based on a different set of firing mechanics than pulse lasers, which I later amended without amending the spreadsheets' damage and heat values accordingly. I have recalculated and rescaled them. In the instance of the Large Pulse Laser, its deficiency was simply the most obvious - the other pulse lasers underperformed, but by a less significant and noticable margin.

Edited by Xandralkus, 04 January 2013 - 04:45 AM.

[Rawrshuga]

Xandralkus, on 25 November 2012 - 01:15 AM, said:

Ever noticed how OP rock is when you pick scissors? And how OP scissors are when you pick paper? And how OP paper is when you pick rock? Rock, paper, scissors is the very epitome of narrowly constrained roles. No one uses their rock better or worse than anyone else's. Skill does not enter into the equation that determines the victor. In fact, I could even argue that rock, paper, scissors is not just a boring game, but a fundamentally BAD one - because it limits player choice. If I enjoy the playstyle of scissors above paper and rocks, then the game model actually punishes me for consistently picking one of its three narrowly constrained roles.

That ... was ... hilarious. I'd like to agree with your chart however there are 2 things preventing me from doing so.

1) Some of your changes fly in the face of the original game, which had its own balance to begin with. I'm all for tweaking heat or damage, but ranges should not be messed with. One thing I feel is missing from the game balancing right now is the consideration of how weapon speed (or projectile speed) affects accuracy. See the problem with medium lasers is that since they're instant beams, you don't really need to target that well with them (though even in the TT game there was nothing like running a medium laser boat). While the king of range, the gauss rifle has a slower projectile speed than the PPC making it less accurate and less viable when you compare size, weight, and space.

2) You left out c-bill cost in your consideration, you bad, bad calculator of things. How dare you. Of course more expensive weapons are better. That's why they're more expensive!

[Xandralkus]

Rawrshuga, on 04 January 2013 - 03:53 AM, said:

That ... was ... hilarious. I'd like to agree with your chart however there are 2 things preventing me from doing so.

1) Some of your changes fly in the face of the original game, which had its own balance to begin with. I'm all for tweaking heat or damage, but ranges should not be messed with. One thing I feel is missing from the game balancing right now is the consideration of how weapon speed (or projectile speed) affects accuracy. See the problem with medium lasers is that since they're instant beams, you don't really need to target that well with them (though even in the TT game there was nothing like running a medium laser boat). While the king of range, the gauss rifle has a slower projectile speed than the PPC making it less accurate and less viable when you compare size, weight, and space.

2) You left out c-bill cost in your consideration, you bad, bad calculator of things. How dare you. Of course more expensive weapons are better. That's why they're more expensive!

As you admit, original TT had its share of problems, the largest and most glaring of which was the medium laser boat. This was not its only shortcoming, I might add. As I often cite when others claim that Mechwarrior Online should reflect upon/draw from TT: You don't bring a walrus to a dog show, and you don't bring tabletop mechanics to a shooter. Tabletop is an idea bank, nothing more, nothing less, and ranges are not sacred. For the most part, I have kept all engagement ranges roughly analogous to their TT counterparts, only extending some to make the associated weapons less useless. Case and point: Flamers and small lasers still do not snipe, despite a buff to falloff range.

In regards to C-bill costs: There is a reason I chose not to include them. It is a very good reason, and I wish I could readily broadcast the following to every player that will ever play Mechwarrior Online, as well as every dev that will ever work on the game:

Combat balancing should always occur completely independent of the metagame cost of an item, whether that cost be in terms of resources, currency, or cash.

When this rule is violated with real-money transactions, it is called pay2win.

When this rule is violated with in-game currency, it is called grind2win.

You do not deserve an advantage in combat simply because you have done more grinding than another player. At the very most, you deserve a little icon beside your name indicating how much you can grind, or maybe a radically awesome glowing paint job for your mech that cost you twenty million C-bills.

The number of games that get this wrong is absolutely mind-blowing. Games are sometimes successful in spite of egregiously horrible game design elements, but they are never successful because of said faults.

Remember too, we flushed just about every pretense of realism down the toilet when we started talking about stompy robots as primary combat vehicles. The standard laws of warfare and economics do not need to apply here, just like the laws of thermodynamics, volume, density, and strategic doctrine do not apply.

Edited by Xandralkus, 04 January 2013 - 05:01 AM.

[zorak ramone]

Xandralkus, on 23 November 2012 - 03:21 AM, said:

Energy Weapons:



Ballistic Weapons:



Missile Weapons:

DPS/HST is a measure of weapon damage efficiency. As you have in your revised weapons stats, DPS/HST goes down with increasing range as it should.

What is your model for determining how much DPS/HST goes down with increasing range?

What is your model for determining how much DPS/HST goes up or down depending on firing mechanics (e.g., the SRM6 vs the AC20, which have comparable range)?

[Roadbuster]

+1
Test this please PGI.
These numbers look far more ballanced than the actual ones.

EDIT:

Xandralkus, on 04 January 2013 - 03:01 AM, said:

If by 'tactical gameplay' you mean the ability of coordinated groups to find mathematically superior methods of applying firepower in unstoppable ways, then yes. It will kill that aspect of gameplay. That form of gameplay should never have existed in the first place. By making everything equally viable, we destroy the ability for anyone, or any team, to become overpowered. Additionally, it creates the capability for any single player, with any randomly selected weapons used to tonnage, to be equally as powerful as anyone else on the battlefield.

The only people that mathematically perfect gameplay balance hurts are the ones that try to gain an unfair advantage through metagame analysis of game mechanics.

Couldn't agree more. There is nothing tactical about boating SRM6, UAC5,... running up to another mech and alpha striking it to shreds in seconds without being in real danger because the other mech uses a more balanced build.
People should let go of the TT rules for MWO. They are 2 different games in the same setting.

Edited by Roadbuster, 04 January 2013 - 08:58 AM.

[Xandralkus]

zorak ramone, on 04 January 2013 - 07:45 AM, said:

DPS/HST is a measure of weapon damage efficiency. As you have in your revised weapons stats, DPS/HST goes down with increasing range as it should.

What is your model for determining how much DPS/HST goes down with increasing range?

What is your model for determining how much DPS/HST goes up or down depending on firing mechanics (e.g., the SRM6 vs the AC20, which have comparable range)?

DPS/HST is only one of many stats. In a prolonged standoff, DPS/HST becomes increasingly importantly as other stats become less important. Understand first that DPS/HST is only one narrow sliver of the picture.

The other (largely) important parts of the picture are APT (alpha per ton), useful in calculation for burst-DPS, and DPH (damage per heat), an indicator of how efficient the weapon is when firing. As you yourself stated, range is another factor.

Firstly, I approached it with the idea that these values should not have massive variations. Some variation is necessary, or else all the weapons become 'too' similar - but when it does come down to DPS/HST, you do not want massive variation.

The weapon with the lowest DPS/HST is the ERPPC, at 0.1063. The weapon with the highest is the LRM5, at 0.2787. Now, the question in this case is, what advantage does the ERPPC grant you, in exchange for such low DPS/HST, and what shortcomings does the LRM5 have that grant it such an advantage in this one statistic?

In the case of the ERPPC, it applies all of its damage to a single spot on the mech, and is usable from extreme range - such extreme range, some players might not be able to retaliate against it. The ERPPC has very, very easy application of firepower, and from a massive range.

The LRM5 spreads its damage everywhere on the target mech, and even with my suggested alterations to hardpoints, mounting a bunch of LRM-5's will eat up all of your criticals. In fact, all LRM's suffer from the issue of poor damage application in this manner.

I balanced the individual weapons on a case-by-case basis, analyzing their intended role (and if any modifications needed to be made to their role, and in most cases, none was necessary). Then I analyzed how best to go about making that particular weapon perform its role without being either narrowly constrained or overpowered. This is really a matter of trial and error; I typed different numbers into the spreadsheet until I was satisfied with the derived values. For weapons among one group, I made sure to give their derived stats a predictable 'curve' along which their performance falls. Case and point: Look at how smoothly the standard autocannons transition in terms of DPS per ton, alpha per ton, damage per heat, etc. While the statistical curves of all weapon groups cannot be made absolutely perfectly smooth (at least, not without some very fancy mathematics), there are no statistically significant deviations.

Sadly, there is one value which I had to abstract, since no number can be readily placed on it: Application of firepower. How the f*** does a laser's instant-hit and damage-over-time stack up against Autocannon and PPC damage application to a single body part, but with a non-instantaneous projectile flightspeed? And more importantly, with hit detection and projectiles in their present state, it makes applying damage with autocannons and PPC's harder by some unquantifiable amount, so it's not as if it can simply be playtested for valid data.

In the end, lasers take less skill if you need to do only a slight bit of damage to core a target, and don't particularly care about spread. However, they take more skill than a PPC if you need to apply all the damage to one body part. Historically, I find that one needs to do the latter of the two more often. I designed the weapons so that this fact is reflected in their alpha-per-ton. The PPC does less, but always to a single part. The large laser does more - but unless your aim is absolutely crazy-awesome, not all of that damage is going to make it onto one body part. Chances are, the entire damage of the beam might not even make it to your target mech.

Best of all, since the values don't fluctuate that much, it would be extremely difficult (hopefully impossible) to find an overpowered combination of weaponry to use on a mech - and the non-radical deviations ensure that even if some team does come up with a metagame loadout that is definitively superior, it will only be by a percentage point or so - which is well within the standard deviation of player skill.

Unfortunately, I cannot stamp these spreadsheets as 'balanced' until there is experimental proof through extensive playtesting that the mathematical analysis of these weapons translates flawlessly into actual gameplay as intended. These spreadsheets are only a starting point. Things would inevitably have to be tweaked up or down a few percentage points; I am almost certain of it.

However, I can definitively say that these spreadsheets are damn close, and are way closer to an ideal balanced state than the game currently is. Not only that, but with the sole exception of ultra-autocannon firing mechanics, everything on the spreadsheets can be typed in to the servers and (theoretically) immediately hotfixed, with very little effort on the part of the devs.

Also note that ECM did not exist whatsoever when these were composed, and I have my fair share of problems with the current ECM system (I think it's total ****). Missile boats do not deserve free reign over open areas - but nor do ECM users deserve immunity from bombardment.

Note additionally that these balance changes assume that non-artemis SRM spread at maximum effective range (270 meters) is not so wide as to be completely useless. It was a little screwy when SRM spread was so tiny as to be identical to autocannons, but nailing an Atlas torso (the whole thing) with most rockets at 150 meters should be the norm.

I actually advocate perfect SRM accuracy (no spread), but sequential firing - to match the lasers' damage application model. Dealing all damage to one body part should either require a stationary target or a massive display of skill.

Edited by Xandralkus, 05 January 2013 - 04:51 AM.

[Ghostrider0067]

Nice work, man. I like the fact that you've taken the time to do the math and fully explain your rationale behind your points. Additionally, your logically worded responses to any issues relating to the thread have been spot on.

Kudos, man. Seriously.

[Scryed]

all I see here is values taken from MW4, because medium and small lasers were useless in that game.

[Xandralkus]

Scryed, on 05 January 2013 - 09:53 AM, said:

all I see here is values taken from MW4, because medium and small lasers were useless in that game.

Mechwarrior 4 medium and small lasers were useless in comparison to mine. Remember too, "Grim Reaper" is not a weapon role, nor should it ever be.

Suppose you have four medium lasers with my suggested changes. That gives you 14.4 damage upon alpha (compared to the large laser's 12 damage). That's actually quite good, especially for a weapon cluster that weighs only four tons - competent alongside other weapons given its tonnage, heat, and damage application method. Also remember, with my hardpoint changes, four medium lasers is something that almost any mech will be able to freely mount, usually even alongside other energy weaponry.

Small lasers still weigh a half-ton each and give 2 damage each, meaning a 4x small laser cluster weighs 2 tons and gives you an 8-damage alpha strike at short range, with damage per heat efficiency so amazingly good, it begins to approach that of autocannons. You will definitely notice when you do an additional 8 points of damage on the battlefield.

Edited by Xandralkus, 05 January 2013 - 11:16 AM.